The knitting diary of a not-so-good witch

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After multiple attempts to make something legitimate out of this Blue Heron yarn… I have given up and banished it back to the stash.

Here’s what went wrong:

1. The Tag – The yarn is from a small company that uses one generic tag for all their yarns. It lists the possible yarns with yardage. The option selected on my tag said “Silk/Rayon Twist – 350 Yards”. Ravelry told me that this was an Aran weight yarn. I ignored the fact that this seemed lighter than an Aran, but I’ve never been skilled at guessing yarn weight. I also ignored that, when I was rolling it, there seemed to be more than 350 yards.

After much more research, I finally found a photo of this supposed Silk/Rayon Twist. It was definitely not what I had…

2. The First Pattern – During my brief delusion that I was dealing with an Aran weight yarn, I pursued a few patterns for Arans and cast on a scarf on US 7 needles. It looked like fishnet… I sized all the way down to US4 needles and was finally able to get a little stitch definition and a solid fabric. I struggled with the pattern for awhile and finally decided it wasn’t intended for such a silky, shiny yarn. You couldn’t see the details well.

I frogged it.

3. The Real Yarn – So I finally browsed the manufactures website (which leaves much to be desired), plus Ravelry, and was able to venture a pretty good guess that I actually had Softwist Rayon yarn, which Ravelry touts as a DK. It comes in skeins of 525 yards, which sounded more fitting to my ball winding time.

4. The Next Search – I began to search for patterns that would work for anything from fingering weight to DK, but specifically those that were intended for rayon, hoping to avoid the issue with the first pattern. I found a pattern for a gorgeous cowl.

5. The Cowl- I cast on the cowl with US 5 needles, as the pattern requested. It still came out very lose with little to no stitch definition. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of lace knitting and all, but that wasn’t my intention for this at all.

I frogged the meager cowl start.

6.Another pattern- I don’t even remember what this was meant to be. A scarf? I think. All I remember is I specifically bought US5 straight needles to knit it. It was crappy.

It was frogged.

6. Let’s make s**t up! –Exhausted with all my previous attempts, I pulled out some size US 4 needles (which I had determined to be the best size for this yarn), cast on some random number of stitches until it looked vaguely scarf width, and decided to do a stockinette scarf with a small garter stitch border. After only a row or two, I decided the 4’s were too big still.

A little frogging was don.

I yanked the US3’s out of another project and tried again. After an inch of garter stitch, it still didn’t look like what I wanted at all.

Finally, I ripped the damn needles out, frogged the whole mess, and this stupid, silky, shiny, beautiful, impossible to use, expensive, wonderful, horrible yarn was banished into the back of stash closet.

I do not want to see it again until it can come back out and behave like upstanding yarn.

Have that problem now. Bought a lovely skein of lace yarn for a shawl, started to knit it three times, and every time, it just felt -wrong- So it’s in the “bad yarn, no cookie!” pile til I get another shawl done. ^^;

I think my husband saved me from that experience yesterday. I was at a craft show and I saw some beautiful home spun and dyed yard. It was very chinky and a brilliant red with silk through it. I was going to buy it but husband questioned what I would make with it and suggested I not buy it. He had a point and so I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t have listened to him if I thought I could have done something with it 🙂